How to make your Ethereum Miner start on bootup

After building my ethereum mining rig, and tweaking windows to make it fast and lean, I just left it as is. I was busy with work, and doing some minor renovations around the house during the summer. Now that fall is here, things have slowed down a little bit and I got a chance to re-visit my ethereum GPU mining rig.

Something I had wanted to do when I first built it was to figure out how to have everything boot up automatically. This way, if there was ever a power outage (especially while I was away), the GPU mining rig would start up automatically.

In order to do this, it was quite simple. Here are the steps I took with my Ether mining rig build:

Make sure that your motherboard is set to boot automatically. I covered this here, but basically it’s a setting in your bios that allows this to happen. I first made the setting so that I didn’t need to buy a power switch – instead, I could simply use the switch on the back of the power supply if I ever need to power off my GPU rig.

Make sure that windows is set to boot up and log in automatically. When installing Windows, or creating your windows user, make sure you don’t set a password. This will allow Windows 10 to boot up your mining rig and go past the login screen.

Next, locate your mining software’s ‘.bat’ file. For Claymore’s miner, I used the ‘start_only_eth.bat’ file that I had customised to use my mining pool and miner username.

Right click on the file and choose ‘Create a Shortcut’

Next, right click on the shortcut file you just created and click ‘cut’

Press the Start button in Windows and type Run and press enter (or press the Windows + R key to open the Run prompt)

Type shell:startup to open the Windows startup folder

Once the folder has been opened, right click and select ‘Paste’ to paste the shortcut to your mining software .bat file into the startup folder.

That’s it!

Now, when Windows boots up, it will run the .bat file which will start up your Ethereum mining rig automatically after powerloss or other shutdowns.

Pretty sweet!

Update: Some people have troubles with the .bat file running before their overclock software boots, and that can be solved by adding a SLEEP or TIMEOUT command to your .bat file. On Windows 10, SLEEP didn’t work for me so I added TIMEOUT 30 as the first line in my bat file. That causes it to wait 30 seconds before loading the rest of the .bat file and firing up the mining software.